Tension is a curious thing.
Solo had worked hard for it, building an uneasiness in Golgotha and his followers, knowing that when it finally enclosed them in its sweaty palm the odds in favor of him and Kuryakin getting out alive would go up. Golgotha had his dream of world conquest; he had Thrush and its agents to help him. But now these men of flesh and bone stood in a stockpile cemetery in the middle of the night, listening to the roar of a U.S. Army bomber which at any moment might blow them all to bits. Solo knew the human mind. Someone was bound to break. Something had to give.
“Bitte,” a voice pleaded hoarsely from the ring of guns and lights. “They waste valuable time—“
Shaking with rage, Golgotha spun on the voice.
“Silence!” he screamed. “Who dares question my authority—” For that brief second while his cloaked back was to Solo, Golgotha’s body was a barrier against the threat of the sub-machine guns.
Kuryakin spotted the split-second opportunity as soon as Solo did. At the same instant, they moved—Solo leaping for Golgotha, Kuryakin grabbing for the hand grenades taped to his harness straps. A high cry of warning split the night, but there was no time for any of Golgotha’s men to dare a shot.
Solo swept Golgotha backward, forcing the trench knife to the man’s neck, digging his knee into the cloaked figure where he thought the small of the back should be. His first intention had been to use Golgotha as a shield for the safe travel of himself and Kuryakin from the cemetery. But now there was no need for that. Golgotha let out a strangled cry of rage. No machine-gun barked and Solo had his sudden, startling answer. They would not shoot if it meant the death of their leader. But more than that, Kuryakin too had free rein.
A metallic hand grenade, looking like a mottled egg, flipped in an arc toward the group behind the lights. Solo bore Golgotha to the ground and burrowed deep. But the man came with him scratching and tearing, his hands like claws.
They found his throat, twisting away from the trench knife as Solo thrust savagely. He had forgotten—the blade clanged tinnily and he cursed himself for not remembering the oddness of this man with the burned, withered body. Some sort of protective chain mesh collar encircled the fiercely ravaged throat—
And then there was no time to think.
The grenade detonated with a bursting, blinding roar of metal and fragments. A man screamed hideously before the explosion trailed off into a dying gurgle of sound. A sub-machine gun stuttered now, its coughing noise popping like fireworks across the open air. Kuryakin yelled something. And another grenade echoed the thunder of the first one. Glass shattered and the earth seemed to lift in a soaring gravitational pull that left Solo feeling weak and giddy. Golgotha’s lanky, heavy weight pinned him to the ground.
In the darkness, he heard Kuryakin rushing toward them. The Russian was panting. “Napoleon—are you all right—”
And then, the sharp, unmistakable cough of a hand pistol, a single sound, cracked just above Solo and he heard Kuryakin blurt in pain and wonder.
He blundered to his feet, his ears still pounding from the too-close explosion. His eyes made out the shadowy, weaving form of Golgotha heading across the smoking cemetery.
Kuryakin’s voice was close to his feet.
“Get him, Napoleon. Don’t mind me. Shoulder wound—I’ll call the bomber before it’s too late—”
Solo hesitated only a second, then set sail across the cemetery, skirting the mangled corpses of Golgotha’s hirelings, barely able to make out the bobbing, weaving cloaked figure of the man who had designed a cemetery as a warehouse for a weapon that could enslave the world.
Golgotha was a ghastly shadow dancing past the tombstones of the Orangeberg graveyard.
ORANGEBERG, UNLIMITED
THE TRAIL ended.
Even in the darkness, he had been able to keep Golgotha’s shadow in sight. And then, as he stumbled across a sudden dip in the terrain and came up panting, Golgotha was gone. It was as if the mists and the fog had swallowed him alive. Bitterly, Solo searched the grounds. But it was hopeless. Endless rows of tombstones mocked him. Helplessly, he scanned the earth for some clue to the passage of the ghoul. Yet the earth had swallowed him up. Solo knew full well where Golgotha had gone. Underground, to that damn tunnel with the sliding slab doors. But finding it in this darkness without knowing the way would be impossible.
The sighing wind seemed to mock his thoughts. Defeated, he made his weary way back through the maze of grave markers. There was no time to dally. Golgotha could have gone for reinforcements.
He might be back, loaded for bear.
Overhead, the blast of the bomber echoed across the skies. He hurried back to where he had left Kuryakin. That was the main concern now—that and wiring this deceptive hellspot with the explosives. Golgotha’s stockpile had to go.
There was a bitter, acrid odor in the air when he reached the spot where Kuryakin lay. The Russian’s pallor was evident, as was the first aid swab planted squarely to his left shoulder. Solo paid a quick visit to the dead minions to make sure no one was stirring. Satisfied, he got back to Kuryakin.
“How’s the shoulder?”
“Sulpha and morphine. I’ll hold out.”
“Good. I lost the Halloween man back there somewhere. Chances are one of the graves is a dummy passageway leading underground, but it would take the night and the day to find it and I wasn’t about to play eeny meeny miny mo. Can you navigate?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Did you call the girl friend?”
Kuryakin nodded. “They’ll circle for another twenty minutes and pick us up at 2100 precisely. We’ve got just about time to do what we came to do. I suggest a five minute fuse, just in case.”
“Sounds splendid. Come on.”
Kuryakin swayed to his feet. “They missed a bet not mining this place.”
“Not really. Too risky. Plenty of German boys would find this a nice place to picnic. Besides, Thrush had nothing to worry about. They never could have guessed that Stewart Fromes would pinpoint the spot for us the way he did.”
“That’s true. Napoleon, let’s hurry—before I pass out from loss of blood.”
They worked in quick, expert silence for a full fifteen minutes. The nitro jelly, each pound affixed with a blasting cap, was advantageously placed in the northern, southern, eastern and western extremities of the cemetery. These in turn were cross-wired to the main course of the explosion. Solo strung the wires into a clock device squarely placed in the heart of the cemetery. The jelly by itself would never do the job, but along with it they planted precisely calculated quantities of the U.N.C.L.E. fire-explosive X-757. Six ounces of it were sufficient to raze a four-story building; a pound of it should raise merry old hell with Orangeberg.
Solo set the clock device, and filled his pockets with samples of the pellets from Wilhelm Vanmeyer’s coffin. “The Old Man would have my hide if I didn’t bring him back some souvenirs.”
Kuryakin consulted his watch, shaking his head. “God knows how much of the stuff is here. They may have filled a thousand coffins. And then—” He winced, holding his shoulder.
Solo eyed him.
“You think five minutes is enough time for you, Illya?”
“Try me, Napoleon.”
“Five it is, then. Time.”
They didn’t wait. They fled back to the low wall in the darkness, clambered over and headed for the rendezvous point with the bomber. Even now they could hear the steady symphony of its flight somewhere in the darkness overhead. Solo steadied Kuryakin at one point and led him quickly across the hard ground.